LOD killing my stuff...

Is there any way to slow down the LOD destruction of detail when moving away from an object? I've got some prim armor i'm working on and when you get a short distance away from the body the shapes degrade and look broken and you can see bodyparts behind them.

Any way to stop that or at least make the LOD work farther away then a few feet?

Unfortunately, you can't selectively control LOD at the product end.

If you are using normal prims, you're at the mercy of the client for how it chooses to display things.

If you are using sculpted prims, I believe there are a few things that you can do to minimize the LOD issues, but I'll leave the details on that to those more experienced with Sculpted prims than I am.

i was afraid of that. only thing i've found is to make them really thick / hardly use any hollow at all. Not a great solution but something i may need to use :/

How high is your object detail slider in your preferences? Turn it all the way up, and you'll be able to see well-shaped objects at much greater distances.

Unfortunately, 3 out of the 4 presets on the graphics tab put the object detail slider at mid. It really needs to be all the way up on high for things to look right. Hit the little Custom checkbox, and the raise that slider all the way.

This won't affect what other people are seeing, of course, just you. All you can do for other people is help spread the word, so they can set their preferences properly themselves. Almost everyone should have their object detail set to high. If people on underpowered computers need to sacrifice something in order to retain decent frame rates, it should be something other than object detail.

It depends a bit on the needed resolution. in principle you can model your objects in such a way, that LOD does NOT visibly degrade the object shape by pulling vertices for differnt LOD levels onto the same location. In fact you would degrade your effective resolution significantly using that strategy. You can see some details in our video tutorial

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2008/06/04/precision_sculpties_lod

Another clever way is to let LOD work for you instead of working against you. Since LOD is an invention, that effectively degrades the resolution of an object as a function of distance (and object size) you can model your objects in such a way, that when the LOD level changes, the visible changes on the objects are minimal. That needs some exerience or a good program, that supports LOD display during modelling (as blender plus domino marama's import/export scripts do)

I am preparing some explicit tutorial for blender on dealing with LOD and we will probably relese it next month, but it should already be clear what i mean when you watch the videos on the machinimatrix blog

i hope that helps a bit.

Note that "pulling vertices for different LOD levels onto the same location" can only be done with Sculpted Prims. There is no process for normal prims that can do anything similar.

It should also be noted that this method may not always work. Custom renders with different LOD systems, or future upgrades will in all likelihood break this.

You're better off just making the armour a bit bulkier so even at low LOD it doesn't let the avatar show through. Or you can cast your vote onto VWR-812 which proposes to let us remove parts of the avatar for things such as this.

What could cause future upgrades or different LOD systems to break rendering of merged vertices ? Anyways i do agree, that merging vertices together is not an optimal solution. What realy sucks with merged vertices is the problem of "jumping surface textures". So, if you also make textures for your sculpted prim, you better use the second method i mentioned (modelling your objects with LOD in your mind, thus keeping shape almost LOD independend)...